Building a Materials Data Infrastructure:

Opening New Pathways to Discovery and Innovation in Science and Engineering

The availability of increasingly sophisticated experimental and computational tools provides scientists and engineers with new opportunities, but harnessing the vast amounts of data generated from these new approaches presents a challenge. Building a Materials Data Infrastructure identifies and prioritizes these challenges, while also providing actionable recommendations for addressing them.

Study Features

Detailed recommendations on overcoming critical barriers, such as effectively storing and maintaining data, maximizing the value of data by enabling its reuse, and creating incentives that encourage data sharing.

A visual definition of the materials data infrastructure that can be used to support educational, policy development, and planning efforts.

A review of 17 prior workshops and events that have been conducted and reported on that relate to the development of a materials data infrastructure.

Guidance on how individuals, groups, and organizations can proactively address the global trend towards open sharing of research products.

Valuable insights provided by a team of recognized experts on materials and data infrastructure topics.

This study was conducted by TMS on behalf of the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Resources for Sharing Study Content

Building a Materials Data Infrastructure Slide Deck: Include any or all of these PowerPoint slides in your next relevant presentation. These have been developed with a technical audience in mind, but would also be suitable for presentations to management or a non-technical audience.

In addition to his role leading efforts in integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Charles Ward is the co-chair of the Materials Genome Initiative Subcommittee under the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Committee on Technology. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Dayton and is editor of the TMS journal Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation. In a professional career spanning 30 years, Ward’s research has focused on the microstructure-property relationships in titanium and titanium aluminide alloys. He is a Fellow of ASM International, and an active member of TMS, where he has served as the chair of the Materials Innovation Committee.

L. Cate Brinson is currently the Jerome B. Cohen Professor of Engineering in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Northwestern University, with a joint appointment in the Materials Science and Engineering Department. Her research investigations involve characterization of local polymer mechanical behavior under confinement, nanoparticle-reinforced polymers, the phase transformation response of shape-memory alloys, nano- and microscale response of biomaterials, and materials genome informatics research. Brinson has served as an associate editor of the Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures and the Journal of Engineering Materials Technology; spent two terms on the National Materials Advisory Board of the National Academies; and has chaired two National Research Council Studies.

Giulia Galli

Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations, Institute for Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago, and Senior Scientist, Argonne National Laboratory

Giulia Galli is the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations at the University of Chicago’s (UChicago) Institute for Molecular Engineering. She is also a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and is a senior fellow of the UChicago/ANL Computational Institute. Galli’s research focuses on the development and use of theoretical and computational tools to understand and predict the properties and behavior of materials (solids, liquids, and nanostructures) from first principles. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has received an excellence award from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Surya R. Kalidindi

Professor, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Lead MGI/ICME Strategist, Institute for Materials

Over the past two decades, Surya R. Kalidindi’s research efforts have made seminal contributions to the fields of crystal plasticity, microstructure design, and materials informatics. Kalidindi currently works as a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), with joint appointments in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Computational Science and Engineering. He also serves as the lead Materials Genome Initiative (MGI)/Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) Strategist for Georgia Tech’s Institute for Materials. He is a 2015 Fellow of TMS, as well as a Fellow of ASM International, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Alpha Sigma Mu.

With more than 20 years of experience developing x-ray scattering and spectroscopy techniques, Apurva Mehta currently works as a staff scientist at Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, a directorate of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Over the last three years, Mehta has been developing and collaborating with computer and data scientists to explore and adapt computer vision, statistical and machining learning, unsupervised data mining, and dynamic and active data management to materials science and x-ray measurements to bridge the widening gap between data collection and extraction of scientifically relevant information.

Bryce Meredig co-founded Citrine Informatics to build a data-driven software platform for materials R&D and manufacturing, and to help translate the vision of the Materials Genome Initiative into practical industrial reality. As Citrine has grown to serve Global 1000 manufacturing leaders and individuals at 2,000 institutions worldwide, Meredig and the Citrine team have received over 25 invitations for talks, working groups, papers, and book chapters on the topics of materials data infrastructure and materials informatics. During his doctoral studies at Northwestern University, Meredig was awarded a Presidential Fellowship from Northwestern University and a National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship, administered by the American Society for Engineering Education.

Jonathan Petters provides research data management planning, training, and curation support to researchers across Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University through the University Libraries. Previously, he served in a similar role at Johns Hopkins University with the university’s Data Management Services group. Petters was an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, where he investigated data management policies and needs within the physical sciences. During his Ph.D. studies in meteorology at the Pennsylvania State University, Petters researched and published on aerosol-cloud-radiation interactions in various cloud systems.

Brian Puchala is an assistant research scientist and member of the PRedictive Integrated Structural Materials Science (PRISMS) Center at the University of Michigan. He is a lead developer of CASM, a first-principles statistical mechanical software package for the study of multicomponent crystalline solids, and is a domain scientist with The Materials Commons, an information repository and collaboration platform for the materials community. Puchala’s research interests include development of both novel methods and basic infrastructure for integrated computational materials science and engineering (ICME), with particular focus on computational modeling of materials thermodynamics and the kinetics of solid-state atomistic processes.

Zachary Trautt

Material Research Engineer

Materials Measurement Science Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Zacharay Trautt is a material research engineer in the Materials Measurement Science Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he plays a significant role in the NIST Materials Genome Initiative and has particular interest in the discoverability, reusability, and interoperability of materials data and metadata. His current research interests are in interfacial thermodynamics and kinetics and mechanical properties of nanostructures. Prior to this position, Trautt was a research assistant professor in the School of Physics, Astronomy, and Computational Sciences at George Mason University.

Vasisht Venkatesh leads efforts in the development, implementation, and maturation of computational methods and analytical models across the materials and processes engineering discipline at Pratt & Whitney. Venkatesh also currently leads the U.S. Air Force-funded Foundational Engineering Problem on the ICME of Residual Stress in Ni-base Superalloy Rotors program. His experience is in the areas of microstructure-property relationships, materials characterization and testing, process monitoring, non-destructive evaluation development and application, and static and dynamic testing. Prior to joining Pratt & Whitney, he worked in TIMET’s R&D lab, where he led key research activities to develop, validate, and implement numerical modeling tools to optimize various titanium alloy processes for microstructure, texture, and mechanical property enhancement.

About TMS

The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) is a professional association that connects minerals, metals, and materials scientists and engineers who work in industry, academia, and government positions around the world.

Many of the programs conducted by TMS are made possible by the generous financial support of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME).